Newly revealed documents reveal that MI5 taught Brazilian secret police the techniques deployed by the 1964-85 military dictatorship in horrific prisons like Rio de Janeiro’s House of Death. SARA VIVACQUA reports
THE British government is preparing to legislate for new “regulated” medical roles in the NHS that it claims will “improve patient safety”: “medical associates.” However, the government and the NHS admit that these roles are not qualified doctors and that they form a key part of the government’s “long-term plan” to increase the NHS workforce.
The new plan for these semi-qualified roles to be regulated by the General Medical Council will drive the supposedly “safe” “expansion of medical associate roles to support doctors and GPs,” amounting to a padding out of NHS numbers to allow costs to be driven down through a “downskilling” of the NHS workforce.
The absence of proper workforce planning since the Conservatives entered government in 2010 was highlighted by the King’s Fund earlier this year as a major cause of the struggles of the NHS, yet the Tories’ response to that now is to fill positions with people who are not as qualified as those the NHS has lost.
In the second part of her critique of Wes Streeting’s TenYear Plan for Health, HELEN MERCER looks at the central planks of this privatisation blueprint
1943-2025: How one man’s unfinished work reveals the lethal lie of ‘colour-blind’ medicine



